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Product Description
In his revolutionary bestseller, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson demonstrated how the online marketplace creates niche markets, allowing products and consumers to connect in a way that has never been possible before. Now, in Free, he makes the compelling case that in many instances businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them. Far more than a promotional gimmick, Free is a business strategy that may well be essential to a company's survival.
The costs associated with the growing online economy are trending toward zero at an incredible rate. Never in the course of human history have the primary inputs to an industrial economy fallen in price so fast and for so long. Just think that in 1961, a single transistor cost $10; now Intel's latest chip has two billion transistors and sells for $300 (or 0.000015 cents per transistor--effectively too cheap to price). The traditional economics of scarcity just don't apply to bandwidth, processing power, and hard-drive storage.
Yet this is just one engine behind the new Free, a reality that goes beyond a marketing gimmick or a cross-subsidy. Anderson also points to the growth of the reputation economy; explains different models for unleashing the power of Free; and shows how to compete when your competitors are giving away what you're trying to sell.
In Free, Chris Anderson explores this radical idea for the new global economy and demonstrates how this revolutionary price can be harnessed for the benefit of consumers and businesses alike.
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Most helpful customer reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Surprisingly engaging,
By
This review is from: Free: The Future Of A Radical Price (Hardcover)
I am considering offering a new product online and have been considering offering it free. I had hoped Chris's book would add a bit of insight into the whole marketing approach and help me define the reasons behind doing so.What I discovered in the book was an insightful history of the concept of free and how that linked to today's trends. He makes a good argument for free being inevitable in the Internet when what one is "selling" is content rather than physical products because the marginal cost soon drops to near zero. He calls this too cheap to meter and if the volume is up then it makes sense. What he now does that really captured my interest and proved tremendously helpful is give a number of specific instances where free can be applied and detailed examples of those applications. He explains that "buy one and get the second one free" is not really free and people understand it is just a 50% sale. He provides the rationale for there being two markets - free and everything else. He provides a lot of specific examples and recommendations and I found myself making notes as I went along. For instance, I'm writing this commentary and I'm doing it for free. On the other hand he introduces the concept of reputation, sense of helping, etc. that Wikipedia and other forms of "free" web content can rely on. He makes you think. For a fascinating and well-written read or as a beginner's introduction to web marketing, I can certainly recommend this book.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Freedom isn't free,
By
This review is from: Free: The Future Of A Radical Price (Hardcover)
The best things in life are free, or so the old saying goes. These days, however, it seems that more and more companies and retailers are trying to get us something for free, and it is becoming increasingly doubtful that all of those freebies are the best that life can offer. Nonetheless, all this free stuff has certainly contributed to making many aspects of our daily lives simpler and more convenient, especially when it comes to those parts of our lives that we spend in digital world.The raise of free predates computers, and it has a venerable history in the annals of marketing. Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of the "Wired Magazine" and the author of insightful "Long tail," narrates the greatest highlights of the history giving products for free. He also explains the rationale behind how the prices get set in a free market, and the reason why in the absence of almost any production costs we can expect products to eventually end up free. The reason that there is a proliferation of free nowadays has everything to do with the fact that the cost of creating and moving bits of information around is essentially zero. Anderson spends an entire chapter defending the free model against its many critics. He takes every common objection to free that has been heard in recent years and provides a cogent and well-informed refutation. How convincing his arguments are, however, may depend on your own attitude and point of view. At the end of the book there is a list of fifty different business models where products or services are given out for free. This is a useful list for anyone considering a cutting-edge modern business, and for the rest of us it gives us an opportunity to take a look at what kinds of things can be obtained for free these days. Overall, this is an interesting book that takes a look at modern economy form a very unique angle. Only the time will tell if the paradigms used in this analysis will survive the test of time or are they just the latest fad.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
To share, to give and to think about,
By
This review is from: Free: The Future Of A Radical Price (Hardcover)
I have worked all summer of 2008 on a project which was stopped by all the reasons Chris Anderson is adressing in his book.This is great stuff and everybody who wants to understand the world and the basics of economics, it's a must.
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